Harry Mount, Author at Catholic Herald

Harry Mount

Habemus App-am! Duolingo has finally launched a Latin course

September 05, 2019

“Of course, no one ever actually spoke Latin,” a particularly stupid – and incompetent – Latin teacher once told a friend of mine. The teacher had been so perplexed by the difficulties of Latin – particularly the ablative absolute and the difference between the gerund and the gerundive – that he thought the language had

Diary: The weekend I nearly died of embarrassment

August 01, 2019

This weekend, I nearly died of embarrassment – literally. I was making my way down to Bullslaughter Bay, a remote Pembrokeshire beach, with my father, sister and niece. As we scrambled down the path, we saw an elderly man sitting on a rock, staring out to sea – completely naked. He didn’t hear our approach.

Diary: I hope Boris proves his old tutor wrong

June 20, 2019

What a pleasure it is to listen to the Vatican news in Latin – or Hebdomada Papae, notitiae vaticanae latine redditae, to give the broadcast its wonderfully unwieldy, proper name. Last week, the first edition was aired. The announcer, Massimiliano Menichetti, speaks Latin beautifully. His Latin is well enunciated – you can hear every word.

Diary: Don’t dismiss punctuality as a minor virtue

May 16, 2019

In Budapest last weekend, I loved the collision of architectural styles: onion-domed churches from the east; classical palaces from Italy; the vast, swelling dome over the Rudas Baths, built by the Ottomans in 1550. There was also a touch of surliness around; not least in the magnificently grumpy waiter at Budapest airport, who refused to

Auberon Waugh was as brilliant as his father

April 04, 2019

A Scribbler in Soho By Auberon Waugh, with commentary by Naim Attallah, Quartet, 341pp, £20/$29 In a 1973 essay about PG Wodehouse, Auberon Waugh wrote about discovering his 10-year-old daughter, Sophia, spluttering with laughter on the sofa at home. Sophia had worked out Wodehouse’s crucial lesson; what Bron called the Great English Joke: “All seriousness

When it’s forgivable to make a phone call in church

April 04, 2019

In the Yorkshire seaside town of Whitby last week, I looked round St Mary’s Church – a spectacular number in a style Osbert Lancaster would call Cliffside-Norman-Gothic-Georgian-Dracula. The Transylvanian count was very fond of the graveyard, crammed as it is with juicy corpses and comfy coffins. As I walked through the church porch, I heard

Private education is unfair, but is there anything we can do about it?

February 28, 2019

Engines of Privilege By Francis Green and David Kynaston Bloomsbury, 320pp, £20/$28 Gilded Youth By James Brooke-Smith Reaktion, 272pp, £18/$25 Both these books are essentially repeating Alan Bennett’s lines in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, delivered in 2014: “Private education is not fair. Those who provide it know it. Those who pay for it know it.

England gets just the right amount of snow

February 07, 2019

Driving around Oxfordshire churches at the weekend, I sympathised with Prince Philip, and his dangerous driving, for the first time. In the late afternoon, a low, raking sun turned roads into dazzling beams of light, almost impossible to see into. What made it worse – although infinitely more beautiful – was the snow. Fields became

Why the ‘yellow jacket’ movement will never take off in Britain

January 10, 2019

Do you get more scared as you get older? I’m increasingly worried by the prospect of accidental death or serious injury. Whenever I used to hear of an acquaintance being killed or injured, I once thought, “Poor them!” I still think that but now, shamingly, I very quickly think, “It could have been me.” For

My marathon church tour

December 20, 2018

On a recent Sunday, I went to three church services and a synagogue – all in one morning. Well, to be honest, I went to little bits of three church services. I was doing a recce for an architectural tour of churches I’m leading – and only stayed for 15 minutes or so in each

The horror and the beauty of ancient Greece

November 29, 2018

The Odyssey By Homer, translated by Emily Wilson, WW Norton, 593pp, £30/$40 The Odyssey – and The Iliad – are everything they’re cracked up to be: the great, early epics on whose shoulders Western European literature stands. But what are you supposed to do about them if you don’t read Greek? Emily Wilson provides the

Latin: the language of remembrance

November 15, 2018

I recently attended the funeral at the London Oratory of a friend, killed in an accident aged only 47. The baroque magnificence of the Oratory was appropriate for the deep seriousness of death – as was the Latin Mass. I have never heard Latin spoken so beautifully as it was by Fr Julian Large that

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